Photographer Martha Cooper just released Tag Town a book of her photos which document the infant NYC tagging & graffiti scene in the late '70s.

Tag Town is a new book of photos from photgrapher Martha Cooper who, back in the '80s, shot NYC's infant tagging graff scene back when there were just a handfull of people out there doing it. This was the absolute beginning of what you call street art today and Martha recorded it tirelessy. She would sit for hours waiting for one train to pass after getting a call from a writer letting her know it was coming. There would be only one shot for a photo since it was most likely to be buffed out the following day. Martha did this out of curiousness, pure interest and love. She thought this was a movement of the minute. She had no idea that her lens was capturing the very beginning of one the greatest art movements of our time.

Tag Town, published by Dokument Forlag, is the first book to showcase early tags in their context. It's a lesson in street art, containing early photos of tags dating back to the 1960s, with interviews from New York graffiti pioneers such as Blade, Part 1, and Snake 1, artists who tag-inspired work helped found what we know as the street art movement. Also contained are some great early artictles on graffiti and tagging dating back to 1973. It's a 112 paged book worthy of any art lover's collection. Keep your eyes peeled for it. You can get a copy on Amazon for only $18 right here.

Note:We just tore the pages out of the book and scanned them. The images in the book don't have the tears your see above.

Fecal Face: Where did you grow up, and how did you end up in NYC?

Martha Cooper: I was born in Baltimore but left for Grinnell College in Iowa when I was 16.
After that I lived in a lot of places- including Thailand, England, Japan,
and Rhode Island. I moved to New York City in 1975 because it was the center
of editorial photography and I wanted to be where the action was.

Did you have a specific style that you were drawn to?

I particularly liked tags with features such as crowns, halos, eyes, and arrows. Stay High type stick figures with crowns were my faves.

Did you ever give tagging a shot?

Many times I tried to develop a decent looking tag but failed miserably. It never looked cool. I found out how hard it was to repeatedly write with style.

Any close calls with getting your equipment robbed?

This was something I always worried about but never happened. Once someone kicked in my car window showering me with glass while I was in the car but I was able to drive away.

What was that about?

I was shooting some kids building a clubhouse in a vacant lot on the Lower
Eastside and a guy started yelling at me to go away. So I got in my car and
he came running up and motioned for me to roll down the window. I saw that
he had a knife so I refused but before I could start the car and drive away,
he kicked in the window. This was in the 70's while I was working on the
series of photos I published in Street Play. I will be exhibiting those same
photos at Subliminal Projects in LA in mid-January 2009.

Are you a collector of things? If so, what are some of the things you collect?

As a photographer, I am a collector of images. I have mental lists of categories of things I'm looking for and photograph them when I see them. Tags were a collection as were painted memorial walls (see R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art). My next book, Going Postal, is about hand drawn postal stickers. That grew out of my collection of sticker photos. Another photo collection is urban vernacular architecture. In addition, I collect vintage images of women photographers and have many on my website kodakgirl.com

In an interview somewhere you say that you never meant to take iconic photos and that you had other goals... what other goals were you speaking of?

I photographed in a spirit of historic preservation. I thought that graffiti was a phenomenon unique to New York City that would disappear and I would have a record of it. I never predicted that New York style graffiti would spread worldwide. Of course I also hoped that I would be able to publish stories about graffiti that would help me reach my primary goal of becoming a solvent freelance photographer.

Ever get mixed with in any beef or one crew?

I photographed anyone that asked me to and tried to stay away from beef.

You run into many if any female taggers back then?

I saw tags by girls but Lady Pink and Lizzie were the only female writers I actually met.

How many years would you say you focused on photographing graffiti and tagging?

I intensely photographed graffiti for 3-4 years from 1979-1982. When I first began, I was a staff photographer at the New York Post. Eventually I left that secure job to be able to spend more time photographing trains. I mostly shot trains in the South Bronx and Harlem, and tags in Washington Heights.
After leaving the Post, I had to look for photography work to support myself. In 1982, while I was documenting graffiti, I was also shooting freelance stories for National Geographic. For example I shot a cover story about pollen, a far cry from graffiti!

Were you doing most of your work solo or did you move with the artists as they worked?

When I went into the yards, I went with writers. When trying to shoot their pieces, I spent countless hours standing alone in vacant lots in the South Bronx waiting for trains with freshly painted pieces to come by. Sometimes writers called to tell me that they had a new piece up and which line it was on. Then I would try to shoot it as quickly as possible before it was buffed by transit or painted over by other writers.

Did you feel accepted by the taggers?

Writers always wanted photos of their work but very few had cameras or could pay for film and processing. Because I always tried to give photos back to the artists, I was accepted as a photographer and trusted as someone who appreciated their art and wouldn't report them to the cops.

When you were shooting back then, where did the photos go? What were they used for?

Mostly the photos went into my personal archives where they remain today. I tried to pitch articles about graffiti to magazines but in the US, there was such a strong anti-graffiti sentiment that no one wanted to be associated with the subject in a positive way. I was able to publish a few stories in Europe, including a landmark one in the German magazine, Art. One of the reasons that Henry Chalfant and I decided to try to make a book about graffiti was because we had had so little success in publishing our photos.

You are interested in and studied anthropology... When shooting these did you sort of think you were recording some sort of human language as if shooting a future hieroglyphics?

I shot tags because I wanted a record of them. I wasn't trying to make my own art. I was trying to figure out how they differed from each other and what similarities there were. I defined categories and filed them accordingly. In some cases I wanted to see their context but mostly I just wanted to study what they looked like and to allow others to study them in the future. I was using my camera as a very efficient tool to make a record of something that would otherwise be lost.

What mainly drew you to shooting graffiti and tagging?

In a mass produced world, I am attracted to anything made by hand and this is a persistent theme in my photos. Before I got into graffiti, I was shooting kids playing creatively when their parents weren't watching. Those photos are in my book Street Play. Graffiti was a direct offshoot from that project.

I was fascinated by graffiti because I saw that, in spite of the difficulty in obtaining materials and the threat of arrest, kids had invented their own art form with its own aesthetics. They were painting for each other, not for money. Pure art! Because the art was ephemeral, photos could preserve the process and the pieces. This made subway graffiti and tags ideal subjects for still photography.

What are some things you enjoy photographing today?

Several years ago I bought a house in a crime and drug ridden neighborhood
in southwest Baltimore. My idea was to get to know the community and
document it over time. I take the bus to Baltimore whenever I can and am
enjoying that project a lot.

Who are some of your favorite artists?

I don't play favorites!

Ok, any photographers you admire?

I'm a big fan and collector of anonymous snapshots.

What do you do for work now?

I mainly work for non-profit institutions in the city shooting for various
exhibitions and publications. I have been the Director of Photography at
City Lore (www.citylore.org) for over 20 years. I also photograph regularly
for TAUNY (Traditional Arts in Upstate New York) www.tauny.org. Lately I've
been shooting some hip hop such as the Women in Hip Hop Festival in Berlin
in August and the Red Bull BC One in Paris a week ago.

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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